The trilogy, anchored by the 1965 march on Selma, is authored by Lewis, Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell. The Eisner-winning project was started because Aydin, the digital director in Rep. Lewis’s office, was a comic-book fan — a passion deeply appreciated by his boss. Sixty years earlier, a teenage John Lewis was inspired to follow a life of nonviolent protest after reading a comic about the Rev. Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and “the Montgomery story.”

“When they called our names, I couldn’t help it — I just started crying,” Aydin tells The Washington Post’s Comic Riffs of Wednesday’s ceremony. “I cried for all of those whose story we have been able to bring into the light. I cried for all of the comics I’ve loved and been inspired by, and the creators whose shoulders we stood upon to be able to receive this honor.”

Aydin has noted often that when Rep. Lewis was an adolescent, Congress was actively trying to crack down on the content in comic books — a ’50s overreaction that crippled the industry for years.